After several revisions this is what I have so far.
I plan on focusing on the femme fatales of Carmen and Vivian in The Big Sleep as compared to Caddy in Faulkners works. This list will definitely be whittled down. Possibly, I’d also like to explore depictions of sexuality since “The Big Sleep” has a central issue of sexuality and pornography at the center of its investigation and The Sound and the Fury have a central theme of female virginity, sexuality and promoscuity. I mostly used Jstor using the key words ‘Faulkner’ combined with ‘femme fatale’ ‘film noir’ and ‘The Big Sleep’.
Dussere, Erik. “Introduction: Unknown Legends.” Faulkner Journal, vol. 28, no. 1, 2014, pp. 3–10. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24908431. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.
Use in essay: to introduce the noir genre and how uncertain the definition is and its connection to Faulkner’s work which is also uncertain. How mystery and the noir genre attempt to perceive objectively what is mostly impossible to see objectively. “Faulkner is as problematic a category as ‘noir.’” The seemingly parallel in timeline between Faulkner’s writing career and the rise of the noir genre. The structural similarity between noir and Faulkner. How Faulkner places the reader in the form of detective in “Absalom, Absalom!” by providing multiple different perspectives of the same events to the reader the same way that the people a detective questions provide differing accounts of the same events, leading the detective and the reader to rely on their own perception to discern the truth. “The book’s narration moves not towards closure but loops back endlessly into its own tortured telling.” The paralleling theme of “radical subjectivity.” “the difficulty of reconstructing the past in Absalom, Absalom! -influenced the style of many noirs…” “
Robbins, Ben. “Inscrutable Images and Cultural Migrations: Wartime Noir and the Compson Appendix.” Faulkner Journal, vol. 28, no. 1, 2014, pp. 55–77. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24908434. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.
Use in essay: the connection of the femme fatale and Caddy. Faulkner wrote the Compson Appendix after penning 3 noir films and walking out on his contract with the studio. The Caddy section of the Compson Appendix has more femme fatale themes than the portrayal of Caddy in The Sound and The Fury. “The way in which these new images depict Caddy differs considerably from her presentation in ‘The Sound and the Fury.’ Indeed, perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the whole appendix is Faulkner’s reimagining of Caddy in this later depiction as a transnational femme fatale.” Brings attention to inconsistencies between The Sound and the Fury and the appendix, showing Faulkners evolution from his initial work to his later work which was influenced by his time in Hollywood.
Librach, Ronald S. “ADAPTATION AND ONTOLOGY: The Impulse towards Closure in Howard Hawks’s Version of ‘The Big Sleep.’” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 3, 1991, pp. 164–175. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43796498. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.
Connection between The Big Sleep’s “confusing” plot line and Faulkner’s own confusing plot structures. Hawks quote “during the making of The Big Sleep, I found out, for the first time, that you don’t have to be too logical. You really should just make good scenes. You follow one scene with another and stop worrying about hooking them together.” This was no doubt in part because of Faulkner’s own writing style as exhibited in The Sound and The Fury and Absalom, Absalom! Which does not follow a typical point A to point B straight line logic but as Librach says loops back and forth.
KENLEY, NICOLE. “The Southern Hard(Ly)Boiled: Knight’s Gambit, The Big Sleep, and Faulkner’s Construction of the Popular.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 3, 2012, pp. 339–366. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26467195. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.
Justifies the connection between Faulkner’s literary output and his Hollywood career instead of isolating the two from each other. “Ironically, Faulkner wrote the material that critics try to explain away as not literary enough for precisely that reason– the popular medium provided him a platform for making an argument about high literature that he could not make from within it.” While Faulkner was openly disdainful of his time in Hollywood the experience did change his writing style. Often it is not the things we most enjoy but those that we least enjoy that change us as people. Authors are forever expressing themselves while writing even while not intending to. Therefore every experience changes their writing. While Faulkner’s hatred of Hollywood is well known, he was once quoted as saying “Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.” his criticisms were not of the writing itself but of the people, calling Los Angeles “The plastic asshole of the world.”
“William Faulkner.” Hawks on Hawks, by Joseph McBride, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, 2013, pp. 69–72. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt4cgsgb.14. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.
Personal accounts of Howard Hawks on William Faulkner, giving personal insight to the author himself and his time in Hollywood. Account of how Faulkner wrote in Joan Crawford’s part in Today We Live solely because Hawks told him too, establishing how women served a function in his narrative instead of being fully fleshed out characters. It also has funny anecdotes on Faulkner and stories about his alcoholism. In Chapter 23 “Bogart and The Big Sleep” he also explains that Raymond Chandler did not know who killed ‘so and so’. Chandler’s lack of surity of his own plot is symbiotic with Faulkner’s own ambiguity when it comes to his writing.
TROMLY, LUCAS. “‘Lady Tiger in a Tea Gown’: Decadence, Kitsch, and Faulkner’s ‘Femme Fatale.’” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 62, no. 3, 2009, pp. 457–477. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26476715. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.
An in depth analysis of Faulkners portrayals of the femme fatal through his poem “XXXVII” the novels “Soldiers Pay” “Flags in the Dust” and “The Sound and the Fury” as a threat to patriarchal order through control of her own sexuality. This also connects the femme fatale as a symbol of modernity. The femme fatale, Tromly says, “invariably entails the downfall of the men she attracts” which parallels with Caddy causing the downfall of the Compson men through her sexuality. He goes on to quote Peter Nicholl saying “the energies that drive the femme fatale constitute a larger sociopolitical critique, claiming that in decadent culture, sexual perversity ‘spells the ruin of bourgeois rationalism.’” He later offers an in depth analysis of XXXVII’s central character Lilith, the original femme fatale though he does not use the name Lilith until the third staza, making ‘her’ any and every woman until specified. He later argues that female sexuality in The Sound and the Fury “transfixes and horrifies men and is frequently associated with death”.
